Dragon Form and Righteous Might are a major AC debuff, and Plant Form has no AC listed

[Colette Brunel]

I cannot help but notice that dragon form and righteous might are both a significant AC debuff at 11th or 12th level, compared to Dexterity 16 and a magic breastplate or Dexterity 18 and magic hide armor. AC 27 and TAC 24 are really quite poor at 11th or 12th level.

During my first run of Heroes of Undarin, the party's sorcerer realize too late that dragon form was a significant debuff to their AC. They were promptly critted to death by two glabrezus.

In another vein, plant form has no AC listed, thus making it unusable at the moment.

[Damanta]

The AC should at least take the potency of the armor worn into account.

Level 12 is +3 armor I think?
So AC should be 10 +7 (armor/dex combo) +3 potency +12 (trained) = 32 for normal form.
Dragon form would be AC 30 when accounting for potency, which is still 2 points too low, but slightly more acceptable than AC 27.

[Draco18s]

This has come up at least twice before. I think Dragon Form (Barbarian) got an errata patch, but it never had an (explicit) AC problem.

Quote:

gaining the effects of a 6th level

dragon form spell except that you use your own AC
and attack bonus, and the unarmed Strikes granted by the
transformation deal one additional die of physical weapon
damage. The action to dismiss the transformation gains the
rage trait.

[Joey Cote]

It looks like to me that even the AC isn't modified by potency runes because of the clause of "These special statistics can be adjusted only by penalties, circumstance bonuses, and conditional bonuses". The rune adds to the armor item bonus to AC. In the case of the Dragon Form and Righteous Might spells.

[Cellion]

Yep, the 11th and 12th level forms are about 3 AC/TAC behind where they should be. My rule of thumb is that the following formula gets you what amounts to "reasonable but not perfectly optimized" AC against enemies of each level:

AC = 14+1.5*Level.

So for a 6th level spell, the granted AC should be 30-31, and the TAC should be ~27-28. Not sure why they dropped the ball on this calculation for those two spells... maybe both dragon form and righteous might used to be 5th level and were bumped up in level right before printing?

[swordchucks]

Druids suffer from this pretty badly, too. If you take a druid with maxed Dex and level appropriate magic hide armor as the baseline, there is usually a form at each level that comes out within a point of that AC (+1 to -1, from levels 4 to 15). The problem is that it is rarely the same form for more than a level or two, which makes having a specific concept a pain in the butt. The dead stop to scaling at level 15 is also a problem.

Elemental form probably tracks the best, in the end, but it only comes available at level 9 (spell) or 10 (feat).

[pauljathome]

I expect (hope?) it will get changed but at the moment Wild Shaping is sufficiently poor to verge on being a trap (at least for druids. Haven't seen a barbarian shifter in play)

The druid is far better to stay in human form, blow a feat for a decent weapon, and be better in combat AND have full access to spells. Probably memorizing Dragon Form and maybe Elemental Form for an emergency.

For the curious, that IS the voice of experience (from level 1 to 12). At low levels the Wild Shaper is quite good, they only start to really lag at about level 8.

[Gortle]

Dragon Form and a few others have been updated in 1.6

I'm assuming the update to Monstrosity Form level 9, is out by ten.

[Turkeycubes]

Gortle wrote:

Dragon Form and a few others have been updated in 1.6

I'm assuming the update to Monstrosity Form level 9, is out by ten.

I am assuming the same thing! The huge number of potential typos throughout the book is rediculous.